Any idea where else these ideas are explored nowadays? I've seen that there are references to related projects mentioned at the end, but so far I had the impression that any research around hypertext (understood broadly) has pretty much fallen out of fashion in academia (and it sure doesn't help that hypertext is usually associated with the specific implementation of the modern web).
Lately there has been a lot of buzz around bidirectional outliners / note taking apps like Roam and Obsidian, so it seems that there is some interest. But somewhat ironically, all the more research oriented attempts that I could find seem to be scattered around the web without any kind of cohesive community.
(Of course there are still a lot of unexplored ideas dating back to Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more modern hypertext research seems comparatively hard to find.)
Glad you found it interesting! Personally, I get a lot of interesting information around these kinds of topics from Twitter. In addition to @maxkriegers, the author of that comic, I think you might find some value in checking out users like @andy_matuschak, @rsnous, @geoffreylitt, @yoshiki, and @elzr, as well as the broader communities that surround them.
I have aphantasia and love the analogy to hashing. It matches my experience quite closely in as much as I can't really imagine faces in the abstract, but can verify a match in the real world with ease. Reminds me of NP-hard problems in that respect – verification is easy, calculation is hard.
With respect to not being able to imagine music though, I don't think the two are necessarily linked. I most definitely get earworms, and as a guitarist rely heavily on my "mind's ear".
Sorry about this! It was a stock copyright clause provided by my university. I’ll look into getting it removed, and in the mean time am perfectly happy for you to use the work (with proper attribution) as you see fit.
EDIT: The problematic clause in question has now been removed.
Abuse of this sort of functionality is definitely something I've thought about, but discussions around these sorts of ecosystem issues weren't my focus in this work. Ultimately, there are solutions. For starters, you almost certainly don't want every link or comment from any user to show up automatically for everyone the instant it is made. There's a fantastic comment by user 'enkiv2' over on lobste.rs about this (relating to design decisions around Xanadu) that also roughly reflects the kinds of assumptions that I've been making in my prototyping about how this might work in practice: https://lobste.rs/s/p0sgoj/freeing_web_from_browser#c_vivphl
To be clear, I’m familiar with the semantic Web and did a reasonable chunk of reading about it when doing this research, but view it as only tangentially related to the ideas I talk about here. If you’re looking for citations around this work, check the full dissertation — there are plenty.
Thanks. It's not clear in the article that this is based on another work. Can you provide a link? Reading the article I too thought linked data was noticeably absent.
and this is as novel way to interact with people on internet using concepts delivered in words, only tangentially related to a comment on a discussion board.
That's a good point, and not one that I've considered particularly deeply to be honest. (I'd love to hear other people's point of view on the topic!) I guess in many ways the situation is similar to that around adblock. Ultimately, the links that are overlaid on a particular page should be solely and completely under the control of the user. If the technology that everyone is using permits this kind of behaviour, I'm not sure companies have much choice in the matter.
> If the technology that everyone is using permits this kind of behaviour, I'm not sure companies have much choice in the matter.
The technology used to permit this; the current trends go against this direction. I'm of course referring to JS-rendered content and SPAs. I imagine, were your idea deployed, most of the time would be spent on fixing broken links and link anchor points.
I support the goal you're trying to achieve. But between greedy publishers and their ToS and JavaScript infecting everything like a pathogen, I fear that we'll have to spin up an alternative Internet for knowledge work. That Internet would be reader-friendly (both human and machine kind) and much more static.
I largely agree. I'm very much coming at this from the angle of 'knowledge work', and think a system of this kind is most useful to (though definitely not only useful to!) scientists, engineers, designers, lawyers, journalists, etc. While the population of knowledge workers is admittedly much smaller than the population on the whole, though, it's still sizable. Knowledge workers play an incredibly important role in our society, and anything that can amplify their intellectual capabilities is well worthwhile in my view.
If the target audience is knowledge workers then this is a nice step in a better direction. Bear in mind, though, that the goal of a knowledge worker is to understand content so the focus of any such project probably shouldn't be on enhancing the manifestation of graph theory on the web and rather on the methods of education available.
Focus on how the content is presented to the user rather than the connections between content, because at the end of the day it's the content I care about and not the connections.
Author here. It’s definitely true that extending existing browsers is the fastest route to this kind of behaviour (though it’s not clear to me if it’s the best route). In fact, if you squint a bit (or maybe a lot), it could be argued that with application-specific URL schemes we kind-of sort-of already have the primitives we need to make something like this work.
Practically, though, if you want the multi-program side of this (which is kind of orthogonal to the 'multiple perspectives on how things are connected' side), then to make this kind of multi-window hypermedia system usable I think you need to have deep integration with the window manager. While Chrome OS tries to achieve this kind of integration by making the browser the OS, I propose that the best way forward here is to effectively make the OS the browser, as I discuss in the article. (Of course I’m not talking about the kernel when I say ‘OS’ here, but the desktop environment). At that point, I’d say the browser is different enough to the browsers of today that the description of ‘freeing the Web from the browser’ is still accurate.
Thanks for the reply! It's a really interesting piece of research. Yes, you're quite right, the browser alone can't interact between all the programs, I was purely thinking of low hanging fruit for the browser plugin.
I watched a Google interview with Douglas Engelbart [0] where people asked him a couple of times if Wikipedia was what he'd envisioned for hypertext, he was very polite about it and said it "was a good start", but he'd clearly wished that we'd got much further by now.
What you're suggesting is definitely a step forward.
The multi-program facet of this reminds me of Plan9's [plumber](http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/plumb) concept, which is an OS component allowing communication between programs in the form of "plumbing messages". The plumber processes plumbing messages according to a rules file, passing them on to other applications. This rules file allows the user to easily configure which piece of data gets delivered where in a uniform fashion.
Plan9's plumber was mostly text data oriented, but it could in principle work with any kind of resource (images, audio files, documents). It seems naturally extensible to URIs. It goes a bit deeper than your idea by saying URIs and browsers aren't special and that all kinds of data should be plumbed between all kinds of applications (for instance, a text editor detecting a DOI in a text file and converting it into a clickable link that sends a plumbing message to the browser, which would then open the corresponding doi.org page).
